Elegon: Disc or Holy?

Managed to get this boss down to 30% before raid was called. Going at it again today. I played as disc yesterday, relied heavily on atonement healing due to increased healing via the latter. We ran this with 2 healers: holy pala and myself. The only problem we encountered was in phase 3 after running back in to boss during the burn phase. Divine Hymn would work wonders here for that part and was wondering if it's worth speccing holy over disc for this fight. So I'd appreciate to hear some suggestions.

What do you suggest also for this fight, mindbender of PW:Solace? The only chance I get to use solace is when trying to kill energy charges and the engine.

Solace is terrible for this fight, I mean seriuosly terrible. Don't touch it at all. You should have zero mana problems spamming all the way to the end here. I found even with not great spirit on the beta I could last to the end by using inner will and a potion of focus with mindbender with both holy and disc. Holy is best by maybe 10%, but disc is also good. You can atonement heal, but its not max possible HPS for this fight IMO. During the last stage, you should have prestacked evangelism. Pop PI+spirit shell, then pop archangel as soon as spirit shell ends after that pop barrier.

I went Disc and smited my way to victory. I HATED THIS FIGHT. It was just tedious with our monks mashing uplift after every add explosion. Though I have to admit it was fun landing 300k atonement heal crits and I managed to do 40k DPS

Solace is terrible for this fight, I mean seriuosly terrible. Don't touch it at all. You should have zero mana problems spamming all the way to the end here. I found even with not great spirit on the beta I could last to the end by using inner will and a potion of focus with mindbender with both holy and disc. Holy is best by maybe 10%, but disc is also good. You can atonement heal, but its not max possible HPS for this fight IMO. During the last stage, you should have prestacked evangelism. Pop PI+spirit shell, then pop archangel as soon as spirit shell ends after that pop barrier.

I did this fight repeatedly on normal and LFR on the beta.

Really? Solace is not terrible. It's a DPS race and you should be able to spam it plenty of times. I went Mindbender and found myself oom'ing pretty fast. Maybe that's the difference between 10 and 25 but Solace was far more powerful here for me.

If you had to heal, I would go Holy. Having a good raid cooldown (Divine Hymn) while the group is spread apart (melee and range are split) is ideal. PW:B is not as efficient as it won't cover the melee and range at the same time.

However, priests are very bad for that fight. I was sat because Monks, Druids, and Paladins are tremendously good on that fight (Raid cooldowns and much better HPS). Add a resto shaman for a mana battery and the group is solid. I went shadow for that fight as shadow (or any DoT class) is very very good on that fight. You'll be able to multi dot Elegon and the add that comes out, which will help push the dps on Elegon that much more.

The fight is very tightly tuned for 25m, so we had to eek out as much dps as we can for the kill.

Really? Solace is not terrible. It's a DPS race and you should be able to spam it plenty of times. I went Mindbender and found myself oom'ing pretty fast. Maybe that's the difference between 10 and 25 but Solace was far more powerful here for me.

Its the casting pattern. I saw a lot of priests in the beta casting the wrong spell selection and falling behind 20 and 30%.

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/534/wowscrnshot082312020125.jpg/

This is LFR, I didn't have recount during normal tests. My LFR scaled gear was worse than what I have now. I had 8k total spirit and I am running 11k now. Maintaining 45-50k HPS is perfectly doable with mindbender if you choose your spells carefully and conserve mana at the right times. You can spend enough time getting lots of mana back from solace and then burn it to heal, but you will simply not be able to make up for the lost casting time. There are very short periods where there is no healing, but you need to use those for pots of focus and HoH. If you have more than 9k spirit, it is simply impossible to get a better return from solace than using mindbender with the right spell selection.

You can spend more than 40s in the fight being unable to cast anything due to being oom with mindbender and its still better than solace.

---------- Post added 2012-10-05 at 07:21 PM ----------

I am susprised to hear the above poster has been benched. Maybe the normal mode on live is different but when I tried it I saw that monks are OP for this, but holy was definitely competitive. In LFR afterwards it was the same. When I try it on sunday I will report on it. I fully expect however that people don't use the correct casting pattern.

We killed this boss with 2 priests a holy and a disc (I was disc), but I think we would have been better of with 2 holy priests.

The damage in the last phase is insane and I found out I could not outheal the damage (and we had people reset at 5-6 stacks), even when spamming PoH and Halo. In the end I also run oom. PoH in Holy does more healing, you have divine hymn, lightspring and when you cast a flash heal (which you sometimes have to to keep someone alive) you get a stack of serendipity. Lastly when you are oom you just make sure you die (by not resetting stakcs) and you get another 25 seconds of very very valuable free healing (glyphed spirit form). Mostly for those reasons I think holy priests will do better on this fight.

You also have to take into account that your absorbs do not get boosted by the healing buff (aka your shields and your spirit shell casts).

As for talents I would say Solace without a doubt. I was using Fdcl(from darkness comes light) since I figured i would be smite healing quite a bit, but it turned out that most the healing I did was aoe (with the explosions all the time). And even during the other phases I thinkt here is room to throw in a few casts. (for example after you pop a divine hymn, which we used 3 times, to save mana)
Also during the transitions and the sparks I was wasting mana smiting the sparks (to help out dps) instead of gaining mana

As for the whole holy VS disc. I am a big disc fan but I will be going holy on most of the figths in the future as I tried both on 3 fights and holy was so much easier and effective. If you yourself are unsure I think you best just try both, dont be afraid to wipe a few times, it is important to know what is best for you; And bear in mind that most guides are based on theoretical numbers and they arent always practical numbers.

P.S. I do not really follow these forums, but I was bored and felt like posting my opinion. I will probably not respond to any questions as I will not see them.

Its the casting pattern. I saw a lot of priests in the beta casting the wrong spell selection and falling behind 20 and 30%.

imageshack.us/photo/my-images/534/wowscrnshot082312020125.jpg/

This is LFR, I didn't have recount during normal tests. My LFR scaled gear was worse than what I have now. I had 8k total spirit and I am running 11k now. Maintaining 45-50k HPS is perfectly doable with mindbender if you choose your spells carefully and conserve mana at the right times. You can spend enough time getting lots of mana back from solace and then burn it to heal, but you will simply not be able to make up for the lost casting time. There are very short periods where there is no healing, but you need to use those for pots of focus and HoH. If you have more than 9k spirit, it is simply impossible to get a better return from solace than using mindbender with the right spell selection.

You can spend more than 40s in the fight being unable to cast anything due to being oom with mindbender and its still better than solace.

---------- Post added 2012-10-05 at 07:21 PM ----------

I am susprised to hear the above poster has been benched. Maybe the normal mode on live is different but when I tried it I saw that monks are OP for this, but holy was definitely competitive. In LFR afterwards it was the same. When I try it on sunday I will report on it. I fully expect however that people don't use the correct casting pattern.

In 25 man there was tons of time to cast Solace. Not really sure what you're talking about. Also, I wasn't "benched" for being a Holy Priest. We are a team and we let everyone get a chance at every fight on normals due to starting heroic progression next week. I had been in for every kill the night before so it was someone else's turn.

In 25 man there was tons of time to cast Solace. Not really sure what you're talking about. Also, I wasn't "benched" for being a Holy Priest. We are a team and we let everyone get a chance at every fight on normals due to starting heroic progression next week. I had been in for every kill the night before so it was someone else's turn.

I was talking about the person above you.

And there is always a lot of healing to be done. Everytime you cast solace you stop healing, the amount of solace you need to cast to beat mindbender is such that on elegon you simply won't be able to beat mindbender for number of spells cast and healing done.

Even during the transition there is a lot of healing to be done and that is also the best time to drink a potion of focus or use hymn of hope. Mindbender on its own used on a star (you can time it so) does about as much damage as solace and you don't have to cast a single thing. If the only time you cast solace is during the transition it is mathematically impossible to get the same amount of mana back as you do with mindbender.

"Tons of time" does not really mean anything. You can cast solace all the time if you want, but it won't really help you will it. You lose healing time every time you cast a solace. The question is how much healing you get from the extra mana solace gives you compared with the healing you lost by casting solace. Also all the mana you get back from solace needs to be used up. If you end the fight without being nearly zero mana you overused solace. You need to be casting at least 8 solaces per minute and end the fight with zero mana to be about equal to mindbender. If you can post a log and I will be able to calculate from it with certainty whether solace or mindbender is better for your casting pattern.

On 10 man, the top holy priest is using solace, the other two are using mindbender. All three are over 50k HPS, which proves my point. You can hit 50k HPS with mindbender and spam throughout the fight with it. The top priest cast 100 solaces, in 8min44s you need roughly 70 solaces to be equal to mindbender, but that assumes you ended the fight with zero mana. Since the other priests are also casting non stop with mindbender he probably ended the fight with excess mana.

The top holy priest on 25 man is not using solace. The 2nd priest is using solace, but he casts 50 of them, which means he would have gotten a much better return with mindbender. This illustrates without a shadow of a doubt that you can maintain max HPS with just mindbender, which makes mindbender far far superior to solace for this fight. You can use solace if you want, but you are almost certainly getting no benefit from it.

Solace is best in very high mana drain fights, mindbender is best for everything else. As far as I could tell elegon is not a very high mana drain fight.

Mazi I just checked your healing logs on the wipes with elegon in the main thread. You have about 60 solaces cast at 6min 34, so its highly unlikely you will end up casting enough solaces to beat mindbender.

Mindbender will leave you oom infrequently, but that does not mean its worse off than solace. It takes a looot of oom time for that to happen. The best way to use solace is to cast about 80-90 of them before the 7 minute mark and then absolutely go to town with an int potion and a haste trinket and binding heals to cap sernedipity everytime the raid is fully healed in the last minute and a half.

I personally think its best to have mindbender and spam throughout the fight.

I personally think its best to have mindbender and spam throughout the fight.

[Everything I talk about is from a 25 man perspective, I have not a clue about 10m raiding currently]

It's also important to note that I was healing 2 groups on Elegon, AND I had to consisitently help with dps'ing sparks. Sure, MB would be a great burst dps.. but what happens when that 6th spark comes out - the one that needs my help the most and MB is on CD? Or do I sacrifice the mana and hold the CD til that one comes out? Either way, it's a lot less mana gain than spamming Solace.

Unfortunately with the way Holy is right now we can't provide much in terms of support tank healing and small triage healing in order to keep up with burst healing (which may in turn mean overall lower HPS, but at least we're helping when it's most needed), and that's just something everyone is going to have to adjust to. I would keep Renew up on both tanks while Solace spamming and dropping a Renew/CoH when the dot went out. That's really all I could afford to do in order to have the mana to keep my people alive during sparks and when the platform fell. Even then it was close.

What I'm trying to say here is, when people say "THIS IS FACT! SOLACE SUCKS!" you aren't really thinking about every situation. MB and Solace both have their place and time and fit in with different raids and overall styles.

I raid 25man too. If you need extra DPS on the sparks gogo offensive chakra. It should be ready to switch before the phase is over? Solace is about 6k mp5. My base regen on raids is about 13k. Just sitting there casting dirt cheap smites/holy fires for 30s will give you all the mana you can ever have. Obviously if you are only spamming solace during the transitions you will never get enough to make it better than mindbender. No point in arguing this further though. If you like solace go for it. There is people there maintaining pretty high HPS with solace. I looked at like the top 20 logs in 25 and 10 man and only a minority is using solace and then again only a few of them are actually casting enough of it to equal mindbender, but then I don't know if they are ending the fight with some mana still left.

My own experience in the beta was that I had absolutely no mana problems with a lot less spirit than I have now. I used the transitions for HoH and potion of focus and then I had to heal people and then we were always moving. That makes solace a terrible talent for this fight as far as I am concerned. Perhaps the fight has been changed now. Next raid day is sunday, so I will be able to check the live version. I doubt much has changed though. Just looking at the available logs is telling. There is people there using solace, getting half the return they could get with mindbender and still I don't see any point in teh fight where they aren't casting.

I raid 25man too. If you need extra DPS on the sparks gogo offensive chakra. It should be ready to switch before the phase is over? Solace is about 6k mp5. My base regen on raids is about 13k. Just sitting there casting dirt cheap smites/holy fires for 30s will give you all the mana you can ever have. Obviously if you are only spamming solace during the transitions you will never get enough to make it better than mindbender. No point in arguing this further though. If you like solace go for it. There is people there maintaining pretty high HPS with solace. I looked at like the top 20 logs in 25 and 10 man and only a minority is using solace and then again only a few of them are actually casting enough of it to equal mindbender, but then I don't know if they are ending the fight with some mana still left.

My own experience in the beta was that I had absolutely no mana problems with a lot less spirit than I have now. I used the transitions for HoH and potion of focus and then I had to heal people and then we were always moving. That makes solace a terrible talent for this fight as far as I am concerned. Perhaps the fight has been changed now. Next raid day is sunday, so I will be able to check the live version. I doubt much has changed though. Just looking at the available logs is telling. There is people there using solace, getting half the return they could get with mindbender and still I don't see any point in teh fight where they aren't casting.

If you're going in offensive chakra then there's a good chance you're going to fall behind in healing, especially in my case where I'm pretty much healing 10+ people. Also I don't understand how you say smiting is going to give you more mana than casting solace seeing as smite actually costs mana to cast and solace gives you mana?

On our 25 man kill I was switching to offensive chakra for wave 4 and 5 as well as dpsing on the pull up until the first add explosion. Still won healing meter.

For the poster above, I think he means this: Solace will regen you mana yes, but will do less damage than holy fire/smite. While you are dpsing in offensive chakra, your mana regen should be high enough that even if you are casting holy fire/smite your mana should still go up.